The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [22]
Pinky has finished drawing a pentacle around my chair, and he finally signals that he’s got it wired up to the isochronous signal generator—two thumbs up at Boris. Boris shuts the laptop lid with a click and sticks it under his arm. “Is time for entanglement,” he tells me, “briefing will continue after.”
“Whoa! What has she—” I nod at the far wall, beyond which the sleeping beauty lies “—got to do with this?” I glance at the laptop.
Boris harrumphs. “If had spend your time on briefing, would understand,” he grumbles. “Brains, Pinky, stations.”
“Yo. Good luck, Bob.” Pinky pats me on the shoulder as he scuttles past the end of the beds to a small ward he’s already set up on the carpet in front of the TV set. “It’ll be all right—you’ll see.” Brains and Boris are already in their safety cells.
“What if someone’s in the hall outside?” I call.
“The door’s locked. And I put the DO NOT DISTURB sign out,” Brains replies. “Stations, everyone?” He pulls out a black control box and twists a knob set on its face. I force myself to settle back in the chair; and in the other room, beyond the two spy-holes drilled through the back of the wardrobe, a very special light comes on and washes over the trapped entity in the pentacle.
WHEN YOU GO SUMMONING EXTRA-DIMENSIONAL entities, there are certain precautions you should be sure to take.
For starters, you can forget garlic, bibles, and candles: they don’t work. Instead, you need to start with serious electrical insulation to stop them from blowing your brains out through your ears. Once you’ve got yourself grounded you also need to pay attention to the existence of special optical high-bandwidth channels that demons may attempt to use to download themselves into your nervous system—they’re called “eyeballs.” Timesharing your hypothalamus with alien brain-eaters is not recommended if you wish to live long enough to claim your index-linked, state-earnings-related pension; it’s about on a par with tap dancing on the London Underground’s third rail in terms of health and safety. So you need to ensure you’re optically isolated as well. Do not stare into laser cavity with remaining eye, as the safety notice puts it.
Most demons are as dumb as a sackful of hammers. This does not mean they’re safe to mess with, any more than a C++ compiler is “safe” in the hands of an enthusiastic computer science undergrad. Some people can mess up anything, and computational demonology adds a new and unwelcome meaning to terms like “memory leak” and “debugger.”
Now, I have severe misgivings about what Boris, Pinky, and Brains propose to do to me. (And I am really pissed at Angleton for telling them to do it.) However, they’re more than passingly competent and they’ve certainly not skimped on the safety aspects. The entity that calls itself Ramona Random—hell, that might even be her real name, back when she was human, before the Black Chamber rebuilt her into the occult equivalent of a guided missile—is properly secured in the next room. Sitting in the bedroom closet—in front of the two holes Brains has drilled in the wall—is a tripod with a laser, a beam splitter, and a thermostatically controlled box containing a tissue culture grown from something that really ought not to exist, all wired up to a circuit board that looks like M. C. Escher designed it after taking too much LSD.
“Everyone clear?” calls Brains.
“Clear.” Boris.
“Clear.” Pinky.
“Totally unclear!” Me.
“Thank you, Bob. Pinky, how’s our remote terminal?”
Pinky looks at a small, cheap television screen hooked up to a short-range receiver. “Drooling slightly. I think she’s asleep.”
“Okay. Lights.” A diode on the back of the circuit board begins to flash, and I notice out of the corner